Interesting New Twitter Applications

People are continuing to find new and interesting things to do with Twitter.

One is Stweet, a combination of Twitter and Google Map's Streetview that uses georeferencing. Select a city from the picklist (or enter another city at the bottom of the screen) and it'll show you the most recent Twitter posting from that city, as well as the Streetview image of the location from which it was posted.

The image updates when a new Tweet comes in from that city, which means it's going to be very interesting the next time there's an earthquake or other disaster. Too bad Streetview isn't real-time. Yet.

Needless to say, it only works with cities that have been set up to work with Streetview, or you get the message "No geolocated Tweet for this location."

Meanwhile, hacklab, a Toronto-based group of computer geeks, has wired up a laptop to the toilet and it posts a random message to Twitter with every flush.

"hey, it's more useful and relevant than just about everything else on twitter!," said the writeup.

Hacking toilets is a time-honored tradition; students of Dr. Jeff Case, one of the developers of the Simple Network Management Protocol, developed an SNMP-enabled toilet in the 1990s to let people know when the toilet (located down a long hall) was free by having it display an image of the status (door open or closed), as well as a flushing sign when the status changed from busy to free.